...United States District Court for the District of Columbia Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled that Section 6103 of the tax code does not justify the IRS from withholding from FOIA requesters by refusing to say whether the records exist. She ordered the IRS to respond properly to an FOIA request submitted by the non-profit watchdog group Cause of Action.

“As we have said all along, this administration cannot misinterpret the law in order to potentially hide evidence of wrongdoing. No administration is above the law, and we are pleased that the court has sided with us on this important point,” said Daniel Bernstein, executive director of Cause of Action....

I wanted to share with you some helpful information from the Arizona Federation of Republican, our hosts for the NFRW Biennial Convention.

PRE-CONVENTION TOURS
For your pre-convention amAZing travel fun, Arizona Trails Travel has requested that all tours be pre-booked as well as prepaid by 15 days ahead. Vouchers will be provided upon final payment. Jump on the NFRW site for more information on the tours, but a reminder that deadline is roughly Aug 24th which is Monday!!

AIRPORT TRANSPORTATION
I have had several members contact me about transportation from Sky Harbor Airport which is about a $60+ taxi ride. Super Shuttle is also an option, not sure of their pricing. How about sharing a limo with friends also arriving close to your time?
Vitesse Worldwide/Mary Thompson is your contact.

OPENING GALA ATTIRE
I have also had several inquiries as to attire for the Friday night. AZ does not plan this but the latest I heard was many members will be outside earlier in the evening with the Idaho Red Potato Truck and some at the indoors Awards Reception. Arizona is fairly casual...we're realistic about hot weather. Suggest something comfortable and cool for outside along with a wrap or light sweater if we move inside with air conditioning? Definitely toss a wrap or light sweater in your suitcase...every place is air conditioned.

Hillary I get it, your campaign is falling apart because you lied about your emails and have been covering it up since. People think you are a liar, you are losing Democratic support and now it looks as if Joe Biden is going to run against you. Inevitability can be a bitch.

But to be honest that's your problem. It isn't reason to obfuscate the press away from your scandals by claiming Republicans want to act like Nazis.

One is the deepening estrangement between the elites and the non-elites in America. This is the area in which Trumpism flourishes. We’ll talk about that deeper in.

Second, Mr. Trump’s support is not limited to Republicans, not by any means.

Third, the traditional mediating or guiding institutions within the Republican universe—its establishment, respected voices in conservative media, sober-minded state party officials—have little to no impact on Mr. Trump’s rise. Some say voices of authority should stand up to oppose him, which will lower his standing. But Republican powers don’t have that kind of juice anymore. Mr. Trump’s supporters aren’t just bucking a party, they’re bucking everything around, within and connected to it.

...I’ve written before about an acquaintance—late 60s, northern Georgia, lives on Social Security, voted Obama in ’08, not partisan, watches Fox News, hates Wall Street and “the GOP establishment.” She continues to be so ardent for Mr. Trump that she not only watched his speech in Mobile, Ala., on live TV, she watched while excitedly texting with family members—middle-class, white, independent-minded—who were in the audience cheering. Is that “the Republican base”? I guess maybe it is, because she texted me Wednesday to say she’d just registered Republican. I asked if she’d ever been one before. Reply: “No, never!!!”

Something is going on, some tectonic plates are moving in interesting ways. My friend Cesar works the deli counter at my neighborhood grocery store. He is Dominican, an immigrant, early 50s, and listens most mornings to a local Hispanic radio station, La Mega, on 97.9 FM. Their morning show is the popular “El Vacilón de la Mañana,” and after the first GOP debate, Cesar told me, they opened the lines to call-ins, asking listeners (mostly Puerto Rican, Dominican, Mexican) for their impressions. More than half called in to say they were for Mr. Trump. Their praise, Cesar told me a few weeks ago, dumbfounded the hosts. I later spoke to one of them, who identified himself as D.J. New Era. He backed Cesar’s story. “We were very surprised,” at the Trump support, he said. Why? “It’s a Latin-based market!”

“He’s the man,” Cesar said of Mr. Trump. This week I went by and Cesar told me that after Mr. Trump threw Univision’s well-known anchor and immigration activist, Jorge Ramos, out of an Iowa news conference on Tuesday evening, the “El Vacilón” hosts again threw open the phone lines the following morning and were again surprised that the majority of callers backed not Mr. Ramos but Mr. Trump....

I said: Cesar, you’re supposed to be offended by Trump, he said Mexico is sending over criminals, he has been unfriendly, you’re an immigrant. Cesar shook his head: No, you have it wrong. Immigrants, he said, don’t like illegal immigration, and they’re with Mr. Trump on anchor babies. “They are coming in from other countries to give birth to take advantage of the system. We are saying that! When you come to this country, you pledge loyalty to the country that opened the doors to help you.”

He added, “We don’t bloc vote anymore.” The idea of a “Latin vote” is “disparate,” which he said generally translates as nonsense, but which he means as “bull----.”

The super PAC bought a full-page ad pushing back against criticism from columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin who described Fiorina's tenure as CEO of Hewlett-Packard as "not so sterling." Tom Perkins, a venture capitalist and member of HP's board of directors during Fiorina's tenure, penned a response titled "The Truth About Carly."

"I was in the room for many of the decisions she made. I can attest to the strength of Carly's leadership, the accuracy of her vision and the quality of her management," he wrote. "Carly was an excellent CEO. She led HP through one of the worst economic times in decades. Less than two years into Carly's leadership, the dot-com bubble went bust. Silicon Valley was in chaos. Companies were shedding jobs almost daily. ... While other Silicon Valley icons like Sun Microsystems disappeared, Carly's vision and execution not only helped to save HP but made it a strong, more versatile company that could compete in the changing technology sector."

"Critics often claim was fired at HP because she was unsuccessful. As a member of the board, I can tell you this is not true," Perkins wrote. "You see, some board members wanted to micro-manage the company, hand picking friends and allies to run divisions. This is no way to run a global company and Carly had the strength of character and courage of conviction to stand up to it and ultimately she lost her job because of it."

"While lesser leaders would have accepted offers of transition plans and graceful resignations, Carly would have none of that. Carly demanded to be fired. In order to restore peace to the board I voted to fire her. That was a mistake."

Max Liboiron, a professor who studies marine pollution at Memorial University of Newfoundland, did a deep dive (aggregator speak) into the story, and wrote:

The black additive [in the balls] is carbon black, which isn’t supposed to be harmful when it leaches, which is great. Yet even with this precaution, most plastics leach endocrine disrupting chemicals that interfere with animal and human hormone systems (Yang 2011). Some endocrine disruptors, like bisphenol A (BPA), break down in water after a few weeks or months. Some don’t. We don’t know what chemicals are in the Shade Balls, but they will leach, especially because the balls are in the hot sun and are meant to be left in the water over a long period (reports say 10 years). Most water treatment systems don’t take these kinds of chemicals out of the water.

If endocrine-disrupting plastics leaching into the water supply wasn’t enough to worry about, there’s also the environmental impact. Liboiron writes:

Most plastics found in the marine environment start out as larger objects you would easily recognize, like plastic bags and toothbrushes. Or balls. Over time, they fragment into tiny microplastics. 92% of the 5.25 trillion plastic pieces floating on the surface of oceans (Eriksen 2014) are smaller than a grain of rice because plastics don’t decay into their constituent molecules like organic substances. Instead, they fragment into smaller and smaller bits.

Those smaller and smaller bits are then consumed by you in your drinking water, as well as by the fish that you eat, the whales that you watch, the sea lions that show up at your bar demanding a drink.

The most transparent administration in American history is at it again -- dodging sunlight and evading public disclosure.
Joining former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her secret servers, former IRS witch hunt queen Lois Lerner and her secret email accounts, former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson and her Internet alter egos, and former Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and his non-public email account is White House science czar John Holdren.

President Obama's top climate change adviser is defending his hide-and-seek game in federal court. Earlier this month, the Washington, D.C.-based Competitive Enterprise Institute appealed a D.C. district court ruling protecting Holdren's personal email communications from Freedom of Information Act requests....

Donald Trump is commanding center stage with his pronouncements on illegal immigration. He says he will build a wall along the Mexican border, from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico, and that he will get the government of Mexico to pay for it.

He conjures up a vision of thousands of Mexican rapists, drug dealers and other criminals flowing here unimpeded. He claims he “invented” immigration as an issue. It’s true he is the one who has made it the issue of the day every day recently, but the other candidates had been discussing it for months.

Trump suggests that the Mexican government might even be behind the flow of illegal immigrants across our southern border. He said he had evidence to substantiate that claim. When asked for it by a journalist, he said he’d had a guided tour of the Mexican border. It turns out this included a chance conversation with a member of the Border Patrol who grumbled that he thought the Mexican government hadn’t been doing enough to stop border crossings.

￼Trump talks as if a 10-foot-high wall across the border will stop the flow of illegals into the country. He adds that the wall “should have a door” through which we can welcome legal immigrants.

Unmentioned in Trump’s orations is that the U.S. Government estimates that some 40 percent of the approximately 11 million illegal immigrants now in the country came here on legitimate visas. The problem is that they did not return home when their visas expired.

This is a very large hole in Trump’s imaginary wall and deserves discussion.

Under the present system, there is no formal warning to inbound temporary visa holders to be prepared to depart on time. The Immigration and Customs service does not know where to find them and thus ignores them.

Needed is a comprehensive system that begins at the point of entry (in most cases an airport). In addition to showing a passport and visa, an entrant should be required to provide an address (or addresses) of where he/she expects to be during the time of the visit, along with telephone numbers and an email address.

In addition, these visa holders should be required to show evidence of departure transportation (a return air ticket, for example). The number of the ticket would be recorded and verified by the Immigration & Customs service.

The visa holder would also be warned that his/her visa will be canceled if they do not call in advance of expiration to report any new contact information.

The airline, cruise line, or other transportation mode should be advised to notify Immigration & Customs if the person seeks to change any homebound travel arrangements (such as canceling a ticket and requesting a refund).

Then, say, a week before visa’s expiration, the holder is called by Immigration & Customs to be reminded of the departure date. If, on departure day, the person is not aboard the outbound flight, notification would be widely disseminated that the visa is canceled and cannot be renewed. The holder is to be picked up by authorities for immediate deportation.

This will take planning and legislation, but it’s worth doing — compared to what the government does now, which is nothing once the person is allowed in.

Will Trump recognize this and make it part of his “wall” strategy? It’s time for him to replace ringing generalizations with such substance.

Hillary Clinton's classified emails contain discussions of conversations with foreign diplomats, issues with embassy security and relations with countries from Russia to China.

The broad range of information that was deemed classified by the State Department — just within the emails published by the agency to date —underscores concerns that sensitive material was routinely mishandled on Clinton's private email server.

For example, Huma Abedin, Clinton's former deputy chief of staff, forwarded a summary of a high-level Sept. 2009 meeting to Clinton in which she detailed the "embassy security issues" that were discussed.

The issues had been raised by Eric Boswell, a diplomatic security official who was later forced to resign in the wake of the 2012 terror attack in Benghazi.

There's nothing wrong with wanting or having The First Woman President, but Hillary borders on unelectable.

A decade ago, former CBS News correspondent Bernard Goldberg authored a book titled 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America. If Goldberg were writing today about Californians, he would no doubt include billionaire Tom Steyer near the top of the list.

Steyer achieved his extreme wealth as a hedge fund manager, an uber capitalist whose profitable investments have included oil, gas and coal.

In 2012, he separated from the management of his company – he still owns shares – and committed to a “green” agenda. He became the leading sponsor and financial backer of Proposition 39 on the 2012 ballot, which was sold as pro-environmental reform measure virtually guaranteeing its passage by Californians understandably concerned about the environment. Proposition 39 increased taxes on businesses — those evil companies that provide so many Americans their jobs — and directed the money be put into something called The Clean Jobs Energy Fund. Steyer promised it would bring in $550 million and create 11,000 jobs per year. But a recent investigation by the Associated Press reveals that it has raised less than 60 percent of that amount over three years, and has created only 1,700 jobs mostly for consultants and auditors.

Steyer has shied away from taking responsibility for, or being critical of, these dismal results, even though one of his top advisors serves on the Proposition 39 oversight committee that, ironically, has yet to meet.

However, Steyer continues to insert himself and his views into the political arena. In 2014, he spent $57 million of his personal fortune in support of out-of-state candidates for the Senate and governor, most of whom lost. And there is talk of his being a candidate for governor in 2018.

1. Will any Republicans drop out? ...
2. Will Republican party actors -- the insiders and others who wield influence -- finally pick a horse, or perhaps two or three? ...
3. Will any of Clinton's supporters defect? ...
4 and 5. How is Barack Obama doing, and how is the economy doing? ...

The circumstances surrounding the nuclear pact the U.S. is poised to sign with Islamofascist Iran are turning into black comedy.

The Associated Press just dropped, excuse the expression, a bombshell story: A copy of a draft of one of the side deals between Iran and the United Nations' nuclear watchdog agency reveals that Tehran will be allowed to inspect its Parchin nuclear site itself, where it is suspected of testing nuclear detonators. International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors won't get physical access and will just trust the Iranian self-inspectors.

In the meantime, Iran is obviously very interested in a type of nuclear weapon that Secretary of State John Kerry and the other negotiators for the U.S. and the major powers left unaddressed during their many months of talks — electromagnetic pulse....

Politico isn’t just wrong and desperate, the left-wing site is ignorant, and proudly so.

By the way, when this same Ben Schreckinger wrote about the crowds Bernie Sanders attracts — the same Bernie Sanders who’s in to rape fantasies, here’s how it looked — these stories are only 2 days apart (SEE IMAGE ABOVE)

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We bring you news and views for Republicans - from Humboldt County to Washington DC - news, opinion and analysis from the best reporters, columnists and bloggers. A one stop shop with links to local, state and national groups, contact info for the Board of Supervisors, the City Councils, Planning Commission, and more.

“Political tags - such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth - are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.” .....Robert A. Heinlein quotes (American science-fiction Writer, 1907-1988)